Nov 23 2025 to Nov 23 2025 11 a.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites and the new middle class, the essays in the volume explore how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change in Bengaluru—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.

Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, the volume introduces the idea of “speculative urbanism” to reveal the complex entanglements of finance, real estate, livelihoods, and ecology in Bengaluru’s unfolding futures.

The discussion features contributors to the volume and two discussants, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Speakers

Carol Upadhya
Social Anthropologist
Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, is Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Upadhya’s latest publication is a collaborative volume on Bengaluru’s transformations, Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (co-edited with Vinay Gidwani and Michael Goldman; University of Minnesota Press, 2024; Yoda Press, 2025). She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), and her monograph on the Amaravati project in Andhra Pradesh is forthcoming from Berghahn Books (May 2026). Upadhya is co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development.

Swathi Shivanand
Asst. Professor, Manipal Academy of Higher Education
Swathi Shivanand is an interdisciplinary historian with a body of work that focuses on urban, gender, labour, development and region. She is Assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru campus. She is a founding member of Khidki Collective, a public history initiative.

Usha Rao
Anthropologist & Independent Media Maker
Usha Rao is an anthropologist and independent media maker. Her first feature length documentary, Our Metropolis (2014) with Gautam Sonti, traces the making of Bangalore as a ‘world-class’ city. The film has travelled to festivals in India and abroad. Her sound installations on the city have been shown at the AIWART festivals (International Association of Women in Radio and Television (Delhi) and other festivals in India. Usha’s doctoral work is a two-sited ethnography of Ulsoor’s Car Festival and the world of the metro that flows over it. She continues to work on the nature of change and upheaval in neighbourhoods caught in the aftermath of projects like the metro.

Bhargavi S Rao
Independent Researcher and Consultant
Bhargavi S. Rao works at the intersection of community action, law, policy, and practice, with over 25 years of experience in social and environmental justice. Her work focuses on connecting climate change, livelihoods, and local governance through research, advocacy, and experiential learning with communities and students. She has been actively engaged in strengthening community-led responses to environmental and social challenges across India and South Asia.

Sushmita Pati
Associate Professor, Politics, NLSIU
Sushmita Pati teaches Politics at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Sushmita’s primary academic intervention has been at the cusp of urban politics and political economy. Her first monograph, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi, was published by Cambridge University Press IN 2022 and went on to win the  BASAS Book Prize 2024 and the BISA-IPEG Book Prize 2023. Her writings have been published in several academic journals and popular media. Sushmita studied Political Science at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, from where she earned her PhD. 

Janaki Nair
Historian & Author
Janaki Nair was Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her books include Women and law in Colonial India (1996, second revised and updated edition, 2025), Miners and Millhands: Work Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore, (1998). She is the author of The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (2005), which won the New India Foundation Book Prize, and Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011/2012). Professor Nair has published widely in national and international journals and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Women’s History, and Urban History. She has held visiting appointments and fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, USA; Columbia University, USA; University of Wuerzburg, Germany;  German Historical Institute, London, UK; National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; Azim Premji University, Bengaluru; and Cambridge University, UK. She has served on the Board of Governors, Institute for Social and Economic Change and on the Advisory Committee of the Karnataka State Education Commission (2023-25), and has been a member of the Kerala State Urban Policy Commission (2024-25).